Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a printing system, a printing apparatus, and a control method of the printing apparatus, and particularly to a printing system which includes an authentication database and performs authenticated printing, and a printing apparatus included in the system and a control method of the printing apparatus.
Description of the Related Art
Conventionally, there is a printing system which performs authentication when performing printing for the purposes of, for example, accounting management, security management, and billing management of a printer. Such a system generally checks the consistency between account information input by the user and account registered information of a printer/authentication server. In this system, only a system administrator is responsible for updating the account registered information of the printer/authentication server from the viewpoint of security.
Accordingly, the system administrator must minutely check and grasp the consistency between each user and the account information, and this complicates the updating work by the system administrator. In addition, the user cannot perform printing unless the system administrator performs the updating work.
To eliminate the complicated work performed by the system administrator, techniques which allow users to update the account registered information have been proposed as described in Japanese Patent Laid-Open Nos. 2004-252709 and 2007-286957.
In these techniques proposed in Japanese Patent Laid-Open Nos. 2004-252709 and 2007-286957, the system administrator is released from the complexity of the account registered information updating work. Since, however, users can freely change the account registered information without intervention by the system administrator, the security problem remains unsolved.
In the conventional system, therefore, only the system administrator is responsible for updating the account registered information, or all users can freely update the account registered information as disclosed in Japanese Patent Laid-Open Nos. 2004-252709 and 2007-286957, that is, there is a choice between the two alternatives. Accordingly, demands have arisen for a system which maintains a balance between the degree of freedom of the update of the account registered information and the assurance of security.